Jubilee-ation!
A History of Royal Jubilees in Public Parks
DAV I D L A M B E RT
Contents
Foreword
3
Introduction
4
The Victoria jubilees
The development of public parks
Victoria and Albert
Children’s events
Fireworks and beacons
Celebrations and the military
Park management for the celebrations
Park openings and the jubilees
Jubilee memorials
Celebratory planting
An alternative memorial
5
5
6
11
14
14
15
16
17
19
20
The 20th-century jubilees
King George V Fields
The 1935 celebrations
New parks and the 1935 jubilee
1977 jubilee exhibitions and events
New parks and the 1977 jubilee
21
21
22
24
26
28
The 21st-century jubilees
29
Conclusion
31
Acknowledgements
32
Cover: The bandstand in Borough Gardens, Dorchester, donated as a memorial
to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897.
© English Heritage.NMR
Foreword
England’s public parks and gardens have played a central role in the
celebration and the commemoration of royal jubilees for more than two
hundred years. The roll call of jubilee gardens, coronation parks, queen’s
parks and parks named after princes and princesses reflect these special
associations from the Victorian era to modern times. Many of these parks
and gardens are of special historic interest and protected by designations.
Over the last 15 years, moreover, many of them have been beautifully
restored with funding from the Lottery. They and other parks throughout
the country will in turn be the focal points for numerous local 2012
Diamond Jubilee celebrations, which is why this seems a timely moment
to look back at the long and fascinating story of parks and jubilees. This
brief history has been commissioned as a contribution to Her Majesty the
Queen’s own Diamond Jubilee celebrations and we hope it stimulates a
new appreciation of the very special contribution local parks make to the
to the life of our towns and cities.
Baroness Andrews
Chair, English Heritage
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 3
Introduction
1 The Golden Jubilee statue of
George III at Weymouth, restored
to full glory for its bicentenary in 2010.
© Jim Linwood (Flickr)
The celebration of royal jubilees has long played an important part in the
forging of a national consensus. Such celebrations were genuine occasions
of public enjoyment but also carefully managed endorsements of the
monarchy.1 While there is only limited evidence of commemoration
of George III’s Golden Jubilee in 1809 (1), the celebrations of Queen
Victoria’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees in 1887 and 1897 comprised
grand displays of public, indeed international, support for the monarchy.
Those of George V and Elizabeth II celebrated their reigns much more
modestly.
Much of the celebration and memorialisation of jubilees was located in
public places such as squares or other open spaces. The celebration of
George III’s 50th anniversary jubilee in Windsor was held on 25 October
1809 in Bachelors’ Acre, and the monument erected in commemoration
recorded the gratitude of the Bachelors of Windsor for the condescen­
sion of Queen Charlotte and her august family in honouring the
celebrations of ‘the joyful populace’ with their presence. The festivities
included fireworks and a feast of roasted ox and plum puddings, noted on
the inscription as ‘old English Fare’, hinting at the political significance not
just of the event but also even of the choice of food.
so it is perhaps not surprising to find that these new public spaces
featured heavily in jubilee celebrations, either in being opened as part
of the celebrations or as the location for commemorative events.
Indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that public parks, one of the great
developments of Victoria’s era, were central to the celebration of her
jubilees in 1887 and 1897.
The Victorian jubilees came at the zenith of Britain’s imperial power, but
also at a time of growing social unrest, when the huge expansion of the
industrial working population was exerting significant political pressure.
That same expansion also lay behind the development of public parks,
They were used not only for processions, military tattoos, fireworks and
feasts but also for more permanent monuments to the Queen, such as
memorial statues, drinking fountains, gates and clock towers. The jubilees
not only served as endorsements of the monarchy and the empire; they
1 See, for example, Elizabeth Hammerton and David Cannadine, ‘Conflict and
consensus on a ceremonial occasion: the Diamond Jubilee in Cambridge in 1897’,
The Historical Journal, 24, 1981, 111–46
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 4
also were taken as the opportunity for a kind of reverse endorsement.
Provincial centres such as Manchester, Birmingham or Newcastle took
the opportunity for self-promotion in the form either of exhibitions or
of major new building projects explicitly linked to the monarchy.2
The celebrations for George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935 were significantly
different, divided as they were from the Victorian jubilees by the traumas
of the First World War, the General Strike and the Depression.
Self-aggrandisement was replaced deliberately by more modest
commemorations. In response to the adulation of the crowd on jubilee
day, the King is said to have responded privately, ‘I cannot understand it,
after all I am only a very ordinary sort of fellow’.3 In a similarly democratic
vein, the Prince of Wales’s King George V Trust Fund aimed to provide
‘more and better facilities for the recreation and guidance of the younger
generation … camp sites, playing fields, club premises … workshops and
gymnasia’. It was succeeded a year later by the George V Playing Fields
scheme set up by a committee of the Lord Mayor of London to
commemorate the King’s death in 1936.
The Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in 1977 marked a still greater
distance from Victoria’s jubilees. Again, coming at a time of some social
unrest, it was commemorated in the form of popular festivities and
events, including the revival of street parties, and also in the form of
statuary, new parks and new planting. The Golden Jubilee in 2002 was
approached with some caution by a royal family still recovering from a
serious dip in popular support after the death of Diana, Princess of
Wales. However, the celebrations often focused on parks and other open
spaces that offered a locus over which there could be consensus rather
than conflict.
2 In 1887, Manchester’s Exhibition of Art, Science and Industry was held at the Botanical
Gardens in Trafford, and opened by the Prince of Wales, and in the same year Newcastle’s
Mining, Engineering and Industrial Exhibition was built on the Bull Park, part of the old
The 2012 celebrations, although coming at a time of austerity, appear to
be surfing a new wave of popularity after last year’s royal wedding and
benefiting from the heightened mood created by the London Olympics.
Following in the tradition of previous jubilees of supporting open public
spaces, Fields in Trust has launched the Queen Elizabeth II Fields Challenge
to protect recreational spaces for the Diamond Jubilee.
The Victoria jubilees
The development of public parks
In many respects, the development of the public park mirrored the reign
of Queen Victoria. The 1833 report of the Select Committee on Public
Walks that heralded them dates from four years before her accession, and
by the time of her death in 1901 the great period of park-building was
complete. The interest of the ruling class in the conditions of the urban
poor, which those parks reflect, was given notable expression by Prince
Albert, the Queen’s Consort. And while many parks were the inspiration
of non-conformists or self-made and proudly provincial individuals and
corporations, and while for much of her reign Victoria was seen as
remote and disinterested, she was also the figurehead for much of the
paternalism that inspired park-making.
Almost from the start, public parks were designed to accommodate not
only promenades – or ‘public walks’ – but also large-scale events. Many
absorbed open spaces that had traditionally but informally been used for
gatherings such as fairs, sports, religious and political rallies. Conversion
of this sort involved the introduction of bye-laws to regulate and control
Town Moor. The Queen was invited to open Birmingham’s new Victoria Law Courts.
3 David Sinclair, Two Georges: The Making of the Modern Monarchy, London: Hodder &
Stoughton, 1988, 1
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 5
these assemblies, and the promotion of what was viewed by the
authorities as ‘correct leisure’.
but it is clear from historical evidence that even in the 19th century, they
were contested and challenged.4
Parks were intended to improve not only the health but the morals of
their working-class users, offering not only lungs for the over-crowded
cities, but valves to release pressure which might otherwise lead to social
unrest. Encomiums in sculptural inscriptions encouraged the civic virtues
of temperance, obedience, duty and patriotism, while bye-laws prohibited
behaviour considered vicious. That these rules outlawed such seemingly
innocent activities as dancing, smoking, or eating may seem quaint now,
Within an orderly and beautiful environment, which in itself was expected
to encourage good behaviour, parks contained a wealth of material
designed to inculcate those virtues deemed desirable. Patriotism was
encouraged by statuary commemorating military victories, or heroic lives,
not only leaders, but also often local heroes. They were frequently the
location for memorials to the dead of national conflicts or of local
tragedies. Statues of local worthies often found homes in public parks and
their memorial inscriptions drew attention to lives dedicated to the public
good, to friendship to the poor or to works in the service of the town.
Other civic virtues such as temperance were extolled in inscriptions
on drinking fountains or other structures such as shelters and pavilions.
And of course statues of the Queen and Prince Albert proliferated
during her reign (2, 3).
Victoria and Albert
2 Statue of Queen Victoria, Peel Park,
Salford, erected 1857.
3 Statue of Prince Albert, Pearson Park,
Hull, erected 1868.
© Stephen Broadhurst (Flickr)
© English Heritage.NMR
4 See David Lambert, ‘Rituals of transgression in public parks, 1846 to the present’, in
Michel Conan (ed), Performance and Appropriation: Profane Rituals in Gardens and
One of Queen Victoria’s early actions after her accession was to open the
gardens at Hampton Court to the public in 1838. A year later, she granted
the Botanic Society its Royal Charter, followed in 1840 by the transfer of
the land at Kew to the Department of Woods and Forests on behalf of
the nation to form a botanic garden. Also in 1840, the Queen received
a petition containing the names of 30,000 signatories, headed by that of
the Home Secretary, which led to the creation of Victoria Park in east
London. This was prompted by the dire living conditions of the 400,000
inhabitants of the district, and the resulting park was funded by a Royal
Grant (4). As her reign proceeded the Queen supported other park
Landscapes, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium Series in the History of Landscape
Architecture, 27, Cambridge (Mass): Harvard University Press, 2007
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 6
4 The visit of
Queen Victoria
to Victoria
Park, London,
1873.
Source: Illustrated
London News
initiatives such as the Woolsorters’ Garden in Bradford, to which she
donated £100 in 1844 after receiving an appeal from a trade union, the
Amicable Society of Woolsorters of Bradford.5 A decade later, in 1854,
she opened the new Crystal Palace park in south London, stating that
its aims were ‘to elevate and instruct’ as well as ‘to delight and amuse
all classes’.6
From the time of their marriage in 1840 Prince Albert shared with the
Queen a personal interest in horticulture. The London Horticultural
Society was renamed the Royal Horticultural Society in 1861 after he
was made its president and arranged a new royal charter. Nathan Cole,
author of The Royal Parks and Gardens of London (1877), reported that
Victoria was ‘deeply interested in horticulture’ and that Albert personally
supervised the laying out of the grounds at Buckingham Palace, Osborne
House and Balmoral.7
5 Hazel Conway, People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, 54
6 Quoted in Jan Piggott, ‘Reflections of Empire’, History Today, April 2011, 33
Prince Albert’s concerns about social and economic conditions in
Britain led him to become involved with various improvement
programmes focused on the urban working class. He took an active
interest in the development of working men’s clubs, public libraries and
reading rooms, and in the design of artisan housing, about which he
corresponded with the social reformer, Sir Edwin Chadwick. When the
Society for Improving the Condition of the Labouring Classes was
founded in 1844 he became its president, and in 1851 he contributed to
the Great Exhibition a model dwelling for four families designed by the
architect Henry Roberts. This building was later relocated to Kennington
Park, where it was renamed Prince Consort’s Lodge in deliberate
response to the Chartist rally held there in 1848 that had briefly
threatened to overthrow the government.
Until his death in 1861, Prince Albert was also a figurehead for an
enlightened approach to the provision of healthy recreational spaces for
the industrial working class. He was the champion of the 1851 Great
Exhibition and of the Crystal Palace when it moved to Sydenham; there,
its extensive grounds – laid out to a plan by Joseph Paxton – were
immensely influential on public park design. The Crystal Palace combined
a range of different landscapes – from its gigantic Italianate terraces and
fountains to its informal English landscape – with an educational
programme that promoted scientific rationalism, imperialism, loyalty
and civic virtue.
Prince Albert was later commemorated in a number of parks named after
him, including examples in Middlesborough, Scarborough, Abingdon and
Salford. In Abingdon, where the park was laid out in 1861–2, there is a
7 Nathan Cole, The Royal Parks and Gardens of London, London: Journal of
Horticulture, 1877, 5
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 7
5 The memorial to Prince Albert in
Abingdon Park, by John Gibbs, 1865.
© David J Maisey, Images of England
particularly notable Albert memorial (5). After a visit to Pearson Park in
Hull in 1854, the Queen and Prince Albert were both commemorated
in statues.
After Albert’s death, the Queen found new inspiration and support in
Gladstone’s successor as Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. Disraeli was
a radical Tory who had supported the Chartists’ petition in the House of
Commons and had studied working conditions in the north of England.
In his novel Sybil (1845), he famously analysed Britain as ‘two nations;
between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as
ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were
dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are
formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by
different manners, and are not governed by the same laws … THE RICH
8 The Earl of Beaconsfield [Benjamin Disraeli], Sybil, or the Two Nations, London:
Longman Green & Co, 1920, 76–7, 315
9 Speech, 24 June 1877: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli
AND THE POOR.’ He concluded that ‘power has only one duty: to
secure the social welfare of the PEOPLE’.8 As late as 1877, he was arguing
that ‘The health of the people is really the foundation upon which all their
happiness and all their powers as a state depend’.9
Between 1874 and 1876, Disraeli and his Home Secretary Richard Cross,
who also became a personal friend of the Queen, saw through Parliament
a number of new acts designed to improve the conditions of the urban
working-class. The 1874 Factory Act reduced working hours and reduced
child-labour; the 1875 Artisans’ Dwelling Act gave local authorities the
power to replace slums with modern housing; and most notably the 1875
Public Health Act, which addressed statutory duties to provide adequate
water supply and sewage disposal as well as burial reform, and crucially
introduced government loans for the acquisition and improvement of
land for recreation. Other acts in this period addressed industrial relations
and education.
Nathan Cole expressed the widely held view that public parks were a
source of ‘wholesome healthy pleasures to thousands of persons’. He
then went on to declare that their ‘value in a sanitary point cannot be
over-estimated; and they cannot also fail in exerting a beneficial influence
in promoting improved habits, awakening new thoughts, and suggesting
fresh subjects for mental exercise of the millions, who might otherwise
be employed in the study of less desirable objects’. He concludes with
reference to the 1875 Public Health Act: ‘It is meet that the Government
should thus recognise the importance of Park and Garden embellishment,
and aid in affording examples which it is highly desirable should be
followed in the adornment of other cities, towns, and homes throughout
the nation’.10
10 Nathan Cole, The Royal Parks and Gardens of London, London: Journal of
Horticulture, 1877, ii
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 8
Prince Albert’s interests had a lifelong hold over Queen Victoria, who as
late as 1883 wrote, ‘The Queen has been much distressed by all that
she has heard and read lately of the houses of the poor in the great
towns. The Queen will be glad to learn … whether the Government
contemplate the introduction of any measures, or propose to take any
steps to obtain more precise information as the true state of affairs in
these overcrowded, unhealthy and squalid houses’.11
Woodhouse Moor in Leeds in 1858 was marked by 26,000 Sunday
School children assembled to sing hymns, directed by placards containing
commands such as ‘Prepare to Cheer’, ‘Sing’, ‘Silence’ and ‘Dismiss’.
The Times reported, with unintentional poignancy, that far from needing
to be silenced, ‘the children strained their throats and waved their hats
and handkerchiefs with such vehemence as threatened to make them still
more ragged than many were already’.13
Prince Albert’s death largely put a stop to the Queen’s public appear­
ances, but until then she had travelled extensively throughout Britain.
Her visits to towns and cities were commemorated in countless statues,
many of them erected in public parks. She and Albert visited Salford no
fewer than three times, and in 1851 their visit to the newly made Peel
Park was said to have been greeted by more than 80,000 schoolchildren
(6). Victoria described the welcome in her diary as ‘a most extraordi­
nary and I suppose totally unprecedented sight’.12 Similarly, the visit to
Visits by royalty were often marked by the erection of statues and
architectural features, or the planting of a commemorative tree.
At Salford, a marble statue was erected to mark the 1851 visit; her
next in 1857 resulted in the erection of the Victoria Arch, an extraordi­
nary structure in a style ‘copied from designs of Indian architecture’,
which was demolished in 1936 (7), and finally a statue of Albert was
erected after his death in 1861.14 At High Beach in Epping Forest, an
oak was planted in 1882 on the occasion of the Queen’s visit, when
6 The visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert to Peel Park Salford, 1851,
painted by George Hayes.
7 The Victoria arch, Peel Park, Salford, erected 1857, demolished 1937.
© English Heritage.NMR
Source: Salford Museum and Art Gallery
11 Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria, London: Harper Collins, 2000, 201
12 http://www.salford.gov.uk/d/lifetimes-issue_08.pdf
13 http://www.leodis.net/discovery
14 Manchester Guardian, 9 December 1936
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 9
she declared that ‘the forest be dedicated to the use and enjoyment of
the public for all time’.15
The cult of Victoria was given an enormous boost in 1877 when the
Queen was named Empress of India. Statuary such as the Doulton
Fountain on Glasgow Green, restored with a Heritage Lottery Fund grant
in 2005, epitomised the image of the monarch reigning over her empire in
what was then the largest terracotta statue in the world. Alexandra,
Princess of Wales, became a popular addition to the royal family on her
marriage to the future Edward VII in 1863 and was quickly associated with
social programmes and charities. She initiated Alexandra Rose Day for
wounded war veterans and was patron of the Ragged School Union,
and during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 1897 she organised
celebratory feasts for some 5000 disabled children around the metropolis.
A considerable number of local authorities chose to name their parks
after her. One of these, Alexandra Park in Belfast, now divided by a steel
‘peace wall’, was created as an unemployment relief scheme, and
opened in the Golden Jubilee year of 1887.
The Golden Jubilee celebrations in 1887 were what would now be called
an opportunity for the monarchy. Queen Victoria had become remote
after Albert’s death, and there was significant republican sentiment, not
helped by the Queen’s alleged response when advised by Gladstone
on the funding of the celebrations, ‘The people must pay’.16 For many
working-class people living conditions were worsening. In 1886 one of
the coldest winters on record had caused terrible hardship among the
poor, there had been a stock market collapse, unemployment was high,
and there had been starvation and rioting in the capital. The year 1887
witnessed what came to be known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Trafalgar Square,
15 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epping_Forest#.22The_People.27s_Forest.22
16 The phrase was used as the title for a musical play about the 1887 jubilee in Blyth,
put on at the Phoenix Theatre, Blyth, in July 2004.
when three people were killed during a mass rally against coercion in
Ireland (8). William Morris wrote scathingly of the Golden Jubilee and
the ‘applause of those whose be-all and end-all is the continuance of
respectable robbery … now the monstrous stupidity is on us, one’s
indignation swells pretty much to the bursting-point’.17 Documents
expressing popular opposition are rare, but one survival reads:
Why waste we our means
Over Kings and Queens
Though ever so good they may be?
Let the Duke and the Peer
With their thousands a year
Rejoice if they like, but Oh dear, Oh dear
Save the poor from this Jubilee.
from Jubilee by Matty Tate, The Pitman Poet18
The Golden Jubilee heralded a public relations drive by members of the
royal family: the Prince of Wales, for example, was dispatched to open
the Grand Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester and the visit included a visit to
Peel Park in Salford where his address stated, ‘We sincerely and deeply
regret the continued depression which prevails in the manufacturing
districts … and we fervently trust that ere long those who have borne
8 The violent suppression of the rally
in Trafalgar Square, known as Bloody
Sunday, 13 November 1887.
Source: Illustrated London News
http://www.thenorthumbrian.co.uk/features/80/what-price-a-royal-jubilee.html
17 ‘An old superstition – a new disgrace’, The Commonweal, 4, no. 76, 25 June 1887, 204
18 http://www.victorianblyth.co.uk/jubilee.html
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 10
so nobly and patiently the hardships and distress attendant on the want
of employment may experience a marked amelioration in their
condition’.19
and radical nostrums’ and their current plan to impose the ‘perpetual
burden of a park for the exclusive advantage of no other than the nontaxpaying classes’.22
Similarly, at the opening in 1888 of Queen’s Park, Crewe, laid out by the
London and North-Western Railway Company, the Duke of Cambridge
set out the dangers that faced the empire and gave an encomium to the
importance of the military volunteer force, invoking the spirit of Drake
and Nelson and remarking that ‘it was a pleasure to him not only to come
and see the volunteer corps, which he thoroughly admired, but to find
[the Company] did honour to themselves and the town to which they
belonged by not forgetting the requirements of the humbler classes as
regarded recreation’.20
Trades unions boycotted the Salford festivities in 1897,23 while the
Friendly Societies in Cambridge refused to join the city’s Diamond Jubilee
procession on the grounds that there would be two of these, ‘one of
working men and the other of would-be “toffs”’; it was ‘class against class’
and the societies concluded that ‘they had better leave the whole thing
alone, and enjoy themselves on Jubilee Day as best they could’.24 In
Manchester in 1897, the budget for the celebrations was, at £10,000,
already less than the £12,000 allocated in 1887, but in the Council debate
the figure was challenged with one member arguing that to allocate such a
sum ‘was not a matter for the representative of a working class ward to
consent to’.25
Preparations for jubilee celebrations were not without controversy. A
proposal in February 1887 to convert some of Northampton’s common
land into a jubilee park was rejected by Northampton Town Council, with
the mayor, deputy mayor and radicals voting it down.21 The committee
set up to explore the possibility of establishing a new public park in
Handsworth, then on the edge of Birmingham, was accused by rate­
payers fearful of the cost, of ‘erring through Jubilee zeal’ in pursuing the
project. A vehement public argument was carried on at meetings and in
the local press, including an ‘Anti-Parkite’ candidate standing for the 1887
Local Board election. One correspondent to the Daily Gazette called upon
the Conservative Association to stand up against the Liberals on the
board with their ‘excessive taxation, neglected thoroughfares, impure gas,
Manchester Guardian, 5 May 1887
Manchester Guardian, 11 June 1888
The Times, 9 February 1887
Simon Baddeley, The Founding of Handsworth Park, 1882–1898, Birmingham:
University of Birmingham, 1997, 5
23 Manchester Guardian, 23 June 1897
19
20
21
22
Children’s events
The jubilee celebrations in both years took full advantage of public parks.
Hyde Park was the location for one of the most prominent of the events
in London, the Children’s Jubilee in the afternoon of 23 June 1887, which
was attended by some 30,000 schoolchildren (9). The function was
arranged with military precision, with children organised into divisions,
brigades and companies. The good order of the children was widely
praised, as was the evidence of School Board education in ‘softening the
manners and not suffering folks to be wild’.26 A large ellipse stretching
24 The Cambridge Independent Press, 4 June 1897, quoted in Elizabeth Hammerton and
David Cannadine, ‘Conflict and consensus on a ceremonial occasion: the Diamond
Jubilee in Cambridge in 1897’, The Historical Journal, 24, 1981, 135
25 Manchester Guardian, 8 April 1897
26 Manchester Guardian, 23 June 1887
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 11
by the innumerable bits of orange offered to them), several
hundred Aunt Sallies and knock-’em-downs, and one
thousand large lucky dip barrels, one thousand skipping
ropes with Jubilee handles, ten thousand small balloons, and
40,000 prizes of the most popular kinds of toys.27
Six military bands and three private bands performed, and ‘lastly there
were the soldiers themselves. Who that has the slightest acquaintance of
that familiar animal the boy cannot imagine the absorbed group round
each Life Guardsman, sitting on a real horse, with a real gun (which might
go off and kill) by his side, and a sword (which might cut off a head) in his
hand?’ The children were each presented with a Jubilee beaker made by
Doulton, and one girl, Florence Dunn, was presented by the Prince of
Wales to the Queen to receive hers personally: The Times reported,
‘The child had never missed a single attendance during the seven years
she had been at school’.28
9 The Children’s Jubilee, Hyde Park, 1887.
Source: Illustrated London News
from Marble Arch to Grosvenor Gate was enclosed with Venetian
masts, streamers and flags. Ten large tents were erected, staffed with
waiters to serve the celebratory tea – a paper bag containing a meat pie,
a square of ‘jubilee cake’, a bun and an orange, washed down with iced
lemonade. After the tea, the children were released to enjoy the
entertainments:
There were twenty Punch shows, eight marionette theatres,
eighty-six cosmoramic views and peep-shows, nine troupes
of performing dogs and monkeys (the latter much distracted
27 Manchester Guardian, 23 June 1887
28 The Times, 24 June 1887
The Queen’s visit to Birmingham in March 1887 to lay the foundation
stone of the new Victoria Law Courts included a route through Small
Heath Park (10), where a mass gathering of some 17,000 children was
assembled to greet her. The park had been laid out in 1878 by workers
from the Birmingham Small Arms Company (BSA) during the slump in
munitions production caused by the end of the Franco-Prussian War.
Children from the far side of town were conveyed in coal merchants’ and
brewers’ vans, and preparations included twenty parcels of clothing sent
to the superintendent of the School Board ‘for distribution amongst the
children in need of better clothing’.29 The Corporation put down boards
for the waiting children to stand on, and there was enthusiastic cheering
as the Queen’s entourage passed through.
29 Birmingham Daily Post, 2 April 1887
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 12
Ten years later in Salford, a parade of some 8000 ragged school and
mission-room children wearing paper sashes and commemorative medals
marched to the racecourse, to enjoy an afternoon of ‘horizontal bar
performances, conjuring and ventriloqual entertainments, and the
grotesque balloons which were sent up at frequent intervals during the
afternoon and evening’.32 In May of the same year, the Queen visited
Sheffield and included Norfolk Park on her visit. Reports of the event
refer to more than 50,000 children assembled in the park (11).
10 The Queen’s visit to Small Heath Park, Birmingham, 1887.
Source: Illustrated London News
Her Majesty, apparently to protect herself from the wind
that was blowing strongly at the time she drove round the
park, took shelter behind her ‘sunshade’, and as a conse­
quence the children assembled on her right hand were
unable to get a view of her features – a great disappointment
to them.30
The park was renamed ‘Victoria Park’ in the Queen’s honour (though
the name fell out of use by the 1930s), Small Heath on its own sounding
‘not very euphonious and a little too local … On the other hand Victoria
would to a certain extent indicate to future generations the age in which
the park became the property of the Town’.31 The visit was commemo­
rated in one of the five stained-glass windows in the great hall of the
Law Courts, which rather disingenuously depicts the Queen standing
maternally among the children.
30 Birmingham Daily Post, 25 March 1887
31 Birmingham City Council, Baths & Parks Committee Minute Books, minute 9102,
11 The Queen’s visit to Norfolk Park, Sheffield, 1897.
Source: Illustrated London News
18 April 1887, Birmingham Archives
32 Manchester Guardian, 23 June 1897
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 13
Fireworks and beacons
Jubilee beacons were lit on prominent locations, while in parks fireworks
figured widely in the celebrations around the country. In Birmingham, the
Diamond Jubilee celebrations culminated in displays in no fewer than
three separate parks. The Birmingham Daily Post gave a breathless list of
the display in Calthorpe Park, which featured ‘an aerial maroon, exploding
at an immense height with a loud report, announcing the commencement
of the display’. It was followed by ‘Crystal Palace’ coloured lights and
stars representing ‘fiery scrolls, fiery snakes, silver streamers &c.’; a
screen of diamond dust; the Star of India; a salvo of shells ‘emitting stars
representing the will-o’-the-wisp, writhing cobras, jewel-headed tadpoles,
&c.’; a shower of electric rain; the Girandola, ‘a revolving wheel of golden
fire … terminating with the explosion of fiery serpents, cobras, and
scorpions’; a ‘glowing palm tree of the tropics, spreading golden branches
springing from a stem with revolving centre of iridescent hues’; a ‘special
national emblematical device, consisting of a group of flags having in the
centre, “V.R. and I.”, surrounded by the dates “1837–1897” encircled
by the words “God Bless Her”’; a Niagara of fire, 30 feet in length; ‘a
colossal fire portrait’ of the Queen, and finally a hundred rockets
forming ‘an aerial bouquet of various beautiful flowers’.33
Celebrations and the military
The military took a key role in the celebrations, not only providing
additional security, but also the focus of some of the entertainments.
As part of jubilee day in Manchester in 1887, a review of regular and
volunteer forces was held in Heaton Park. The troops marched through
the town to Victoria station for transport to the park, and it was
remarked without irony in a city that had witnessed the Peterloo Massacre
33 Birmingham Daily Post, 22 June 1897
34 Manchester Guardian, 22 June 1887
within living memory that, ‘The passage of so many troops through the
streets added greatly to the animated spectacle which the city presented’.
At the park, the troops formed into divisions and infantry and cavalry
staged a mock battle ‘attacking an imaginary foe’.34
In Liverpool in 1897 a military review was held in Wavertree Playground
(the 40-hectare park now known as ‘The Mystery’) featuring more than
7000 troops and watched by some 60,000 or more spectators, held
back by a wooden fence. At some point, apparently encouraged by the
movement of more privileged spectators closer to the demonstrations,
the crowds broke through the fence.
The police, who were 160 strong, were swept away like
cobwebs, and the stream of hurrying spectators spread all
over the enclosure. The cordon of police on foot were
utterly unable to do anything with such a mass of invaders,
but the mounted officers … considered it their duty to do
something to stem the torrent and restore order, but the
people had got out of hand, and a regiment of cavalry alone
could have coped with them.
The people were seemingly not intent on trouble, but in the ‘scurry’ that
then took place:
one or two mounted policemen charged through the flying
crowd at full gallop, very recklessly it seemed to those who
were watching … One man was knocked down, while a
horseman was proceeding at full tilt among the crowd, while
another was more severely hurt, being also ridden down by
another member of the mounted troops.35
35 Liverpool Daily Post, 21 June 1897
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 14
The injuries were not life-threatening, but the account suggests a degree
of nervousness on the part of the police faced with such a large crowd.
The Royal Salute was fired in many parks. In Cannon Hill Park,
Birmingham, ‘admiration of the eight heavy guns, forming with their
gunners and escort two batteries, and of the artillery-men in their impos­
ing uniform of scarlet-faced tunics and busbies, served to pleasantly while
away the time of waiting for the Lord Mayor and his party’.36 And military
bands playing stirring music featured prominently in the entertainments.
Park management for the celebrations
The celebrations made considerable demands on park staff. They
certainly offered an opportunity to show off the park and their horticul­
tural skills. For the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to Salford’s
Peel Park in June 1887, a platform was erected outside the Museum,
draped with red cloth, and decorated with ‘Venetian masts, streamers,
festoons of garlands and spiral wreathings of brightly tinted artificial
flowers’.37 The head gardener, Mr Moore, ‘naturally took charge of the
floral decorations’ laying out pots by the stage including ‘Thuja gigantea,
Picea nobilis, hemlock spruce, Weymouth pine and other coniferae’. The
gravel path in front ‘was backed and fringed by Mr Moore with a prettily
variegated assortment of flowers and plants. These comprised Spiraea
japonica, different kinds of azaleas, cystus, Aucuba japonica and conifers’.
But the scale of the events also put parks under some strain. The sheer
number of people attending the celebrations caused them problems.
36
37
38
39
Birmingham Daily Post, 23 June 1897
Manchester Guardian, 5 May 1887
Birmingham Daily Post, 22 June 1897
Manchester Guardian, 8 April 1897
At the fireworks display in Summerfield Park in Birmingham, it was noted
laconically: ‘Every available inch of ground was occupied, and the police,
of whom there were seventy … had considerable difficulty in preventing
the spoliation of the cultivated patches.’38 One populist councillor in
Manchester stated that ‘the object was to give pleasure to those who got
the least enjoyment in this world … and he would say for once, “If the
people destroy all the grass, let them destroy it”’.39
In central London, the challenges were particularly acute. In Green Park in
1897, an enormous stand was erected at the end of Constitution Hill. This
required pruning ‘the obtruding branches of the fine elm, lime and
sycamore trees here abounding’,40 and on 17 June, four days before jubilee
day, ‘cartloads of leafy limbs were being carried out’. In St James’s Park,
where vast crowds were expected, and ‘in order to prevent any climbing
into the trees, the trunks of those which are anywhere near the railings
[were] encircled some half-dozen feet up with rings of barbed wire’.41
The size of the crowds resulted in a familiar, although at the time a new
problem. As the day’s celebrations in London drew to a close, the crowds
drifted away from Buckingham Palace; ‘St James’s and the Green Park
(12), however, became transformed into huge encampments of those
who, wearied out with hours of standing, were glad to stretch themselves
on the greensward and refresh the inner man’, and it was noted that ‘the
Mall was strewn with the relics of these al fresco feasts, as, for instance,
much sandwich paper, which ill accorded with the natural decorations of
this favoured spot’.42
40 Manchester Guardian, 17 June 1887
41 Manchester Guardian, 17 June 1897
42 Manchester Guardian, 23 June 1897
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 15
and healthful recreation to us all that we wonder how we ever got on
without it’ – and after their completion, a flag with the name ‘Victoria
Park’ was hoisted to loud and prolonged cheering and the Rifle Volunteers
drew up in double line and fired a feu de joie.43
Not all of them could quite make it: the ratepayer protests in the
Birmingham suburb of Handsworth meant that the park was not opened
until 20 June 1888, when it was named Victoria Park, a title which has now
been dropped. At Bilston in the West Midlands, although negotiations for
taking up an offer of land for a public park ‘were pushed on with the
utmost dispatch’, time ran out – ‘Notwithstanding that this important item
in the programme was of necessity omitted, the celebration of the Jubilee
was a complete success’.44
12 Crowds waiting for the 1897 Diamond Jubilee procession to pass the
Wellington Arch, on the edge of Green Park, in London.
© English Heritage.NMR
Park openings and the jubilees
A number of authorities took the opportunity of a jubilee year to
celebrate the opening of a new public park and to request permission to
name it after the Queen. At St Helens in the old county of Lancashire,
the Cowley Hill estate had been purchased and opened in 1886, and
works to provide it with the amenities of a public park had been carried
on subsequently by the borough surveyor, Mr Broom, and the park
keeper, Mr Pye. On 21 June 1887, there was a naming ceremony to
celebrate the Golden Jubilee, in front of a large crowd: ‘We have met in
such numbers today as the St Helen’s public have never met before’. The
speeches hailed the importance of the park – ‘such a source of enjoyment
43 St Helen’s News, 25 June 1887
44 Birmingham Daily Post, 22 June 1887
In Crewe, the hope that the park would be fully ready for the public in
time for the 1887 jubilee, which would have neatly created a joint jubilee
with the 50th anniversary of the Great Junction Railway’s arrival in the
town, was not fulfilled. Although the actual opening was delayed for a
further twelve months, celebrations did go ahead with a dedication, as the
company (now renamed as the London and North Western Railway) was
keen to celebrate its own jubilee, especially as the year coincided with the
production of its three-thousandth locomotive in Crewe. Venetian masts,
streamers and flags lined Victoria Avenue and around the park, and a
‘Grand Procession’ led to the park, while the commemorative medal had
the Queen on one side and an image of the new engine on the other.45
A ‘Fireman’s Arch’ was built by the Crewe Volunteer Fire Brigade at the
entrance to Victoria Avenue, constructed from fire-escape ladders,
decorated with bunting, shields, mottoes and the town council’s coat of
arms, and the celebrations climaxed in a cascade of balloons and a fire­
work display.46 When the park was formally opened the following year,
45 Manchester Guardian, 5 July 1887
46 http://www.crewetown.co.uk/history.htm
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 16
the memorial inscription on the drinking fountain recorded that it was
unveiled by James Middleton, ‘who completed his fiftieth year as engine
driver for [the company] in the Jubilee year of Her Majesty’s reign, 1887’.
Park construction was often slower than expected: William Barron’s
Victoria Park in Widnes was intended to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee in
1897 but did not open until 1900. Victoria Park in Finchley was originally
planned to commemorate the Golden Jubilee in 1887, but only opened in
1902. At Victoria Park, Tunstall, the first sod was cut in 1897 with the
intention of commemorating the Diamond Jubilee, but delays in planning
and construction meant that by the time the commemorative foundation
stone for the lodge was laid in 1903, it had to be inscribed instead to
celebrate the coronation of Edward VII. And although access had been
allowed throughout construction, the gates were only formally opened in
1908. Land on Windmill Hill, on the south side of Bristol, was earmarked
by the council for a park in 1887 but not finally acquired until two years
later. In the meantime the local ratepayers had successfully campaigned
for it to be named after the Queen, a move that seems to have been
inspired by a desire to rid it of its previous identity as a place of unpoliced
public resort and public meetings.47
Some local authorities made a jubilee event of the purchase of land for
recreation. Highgate Wood and Queen’s Park in Kensal Rise were both
acquired by the Corporation of the City of London to celebrate the
1887 jubilee. The construction of Victoria Park in Smethwick on former
farmland was begun in 1887, and in 1897 the land for Pymmes Park,
Edmonton, was acquired for the Diamond Jubilee.48
47 David Lambert, Historic Public Parks of Bristol, Bristol: Avon Gardens Trust, 2000, 46
Jubilee memorials
The jubilees of 1887 and 1897 were also celebrated with a range of built
and planted features. New park gates were erected at Leazes Park in
Newcastle upon Tyne to mark the Diamond Jubilee (13). At Borough
Gardens in Dorchester, the bandstand was donated in 1897 as a memorial
to Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee (14), as was the bandstand in
Salford’s recently restored Victoria Park. A red marble obelisk dated 1887
in St Paul’s Recreation Ground in Hounslow was erected by public
subscription to record the gift of the park. In Hereford’s Castle Green, the
memorial opened in 1898 to commemorate the jubilee of the previous
year took the form of the Victoria footbridge, ornamented with the royal
arms on both sides of the centre span and each of the steel arches.
In many parks the 1897 jubilee was marked with a memorial drinking
fountain, while more unusually in Bold Venture Park, on the edge of
Darwen in Lancashire, the Gillibrand Meteorological Observatory was
the gift of Councillor J W Gillibrand of Earlsfield (15).
13 The gates at Leazes
Park, Newcastle upon
Tyne, erected for the
1897 Diamond Jubilee.
© Padraicyclops (Flickr)
48 Hazel Conway, ‘Commemorating royal occasions in London’s parks’,The London
Gardener, 7, 2001–2, 35–42, passim
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 17
Not all the jubilee monuments now in public parks were first erected
there. Parks have often been the repository for items of public art which
have outlived their original location. At Endcliffe Park in Sheffield, the 1887
jubilee obelisk in the park originally stood in Fargate, and was moved to
the park in 1905 to make way for the very fine statue of Victoria flanked
by heroic figures of Labour and Maternity that was erected on her death
(16). This in turn was also moved to the park, in 1930. The monument to
the jubilee opening of the park is a more unconventional object, formed
from rough stones to resemble a dolmen, inscribed and dated 1887.
14 The Diamond Jubilee bandstand in
Borough Gardens, Dorchester (see front
cover), renovated in 2007 with the help of a
grant from Heritage Lottery Fund.
16 The obelisk,
Endcliffe Park,
Sheffield, originally
erected in Fargate to
commemorate the
1887 Golden Jubilee
but relocated to the
park in 1905.
15 The observatory, Bold Venture Park,
Darwen, erected 1897, rebuilt 1952 and
demolished in the 1970s.
Mick Kelly © Darwen Days
© Neil Theasby
© Jim Linwood (Flickr)
In Windsor Great Park, the 1887 Women’s Jubilee Offering comprised a
statue of Prince Albert, for which the Queen laid the foundation stone.49
In Manchester, the statue of Victoria in Piccadilly Gardens was commis­
sioned by the corporation’s Jubilee Commemoration Fund in 1897 but
only completed in 1901 after the Queen’s death. The opening ceremony
was characterised by significant disorder with dignitaries using chairs and a
ladder to climb the garden railings to escape the crowd. The statue was
much criticised – ‘as a work of art it is bad, and as a work of patriotism it
is futile’ was one verdict – and in later years it was frequently vandalised
while its steps became a venue for informal public meetings and
speeches.50
49 The Times, 15 July 1887
50 http://pmsa.cch.kcl.ac.uk/MR/MR-MCR03.htm
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 18
Celebratory planting
Memorial trees featured prominently. The gardens of the Middle Temple
contain two mulberries planted in Fountain Court to commemorate the
Golden Jubilee. In Wigan, in 1887, Mesnes Park was closed for the
mayor’s and mayoress’s garden party, and four fine sycamores – the
preferred choice for planting in poor atmospheric conditions – were
planted, while a royal salute of twenty-one blasts of the foghorn was
given by London and North-Western Railway engines from the nearby
line. The mayor hoped that the trees would ‘grow up and prosper for
many hundreds of years, and not only be a shelter to the people of
Wigan, but be an ornament to that beautiful park’.51 Two of the trees
have survived and the park is now being restored with the help of
£6.5m of Heritage Lottery funding.
The jubilees were also an occasion for bedding displays (17). At Victoria
Park in St Helens in 1897, the bed opposite the entrance, in which the
name of the park was picked out in bedding, was supplemented with the
words ‘Diamond Jubilee’, ‘the letters being written in echeverias on a
grounding of purple beet, bordered by pyrethrum’.52 The crown planted
at Cannon Hill Park in Birmingham is typical of the kind of displays that
would have marked the jubilee celebrations (18). The Royal Horticultural
Society established its Victoria Medal of Honour in 1897 ‘in perpetual
remembrance of Her Majesty’s glorious reign, and to enable the Council
to confer honour on British horticulturists’. The award is restricted to
63 horticulturists at any one time, in commemoration of the 63 years of
Queen Victoria’s reign.
17 Commemorative bedding for the 1897 Diamond Jubilee, South Park, Darlington.
18 Floral crown, Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham.
© English Heritage.NMR
© English Heritage.NMR
51 Wigan Examiner, 21 June 1887
52 St Helen’s News, 4 September 1897
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 19
An alternative memorial
While William Morris had nothing but scorn for the ‘monstrous stupidity’
of the 1887 jubilee, his fellow socialist George Frederick Watts came up
with an alternative to monuments to the Queen herself – a memorial to
the lives of ordinary people who had performed extraordinary acts of
heroism. In a letter to The Times on 5 September 1887 entitled ‘Another
Jubilee Suggestion’, Watts proposed a complete record of the ‘stories of
heroism in every-day life’.
The character of a nation as a people of great deeds is one,
it appears to me, that should not be lost sight of. It must
surely be a matter of regret when names worthy to be
remembered and stories stimulating and instructive are
allowed to be forgotten.
Watts’s original idea was for a ‘kind of Campo Santo’ with a marble wall
of inscriptions in Hyde Park. It was not taken up but in 1898 it was revived
by the promoters of a new park beside St Botolph’s church in the City of
London. The Metropolitan Public Gardens Association was struggling to
save the former churchyard from development – Octavia Hill had donated
£1000 – and the vicar approached Watts about his scheme. A reduced
version of his proposal was agreed and work began in 1899, with the
selection of the texts based on cuttings collected by Watts over many
years. The work was delegated to a Heroic Self-Sacrifice Memorial
Committee, employing William de Morgan, a friend of Watts, to design
the tiles (19). After Watts’s death in 1904, the work continued under the
leadership of his wife Mary but after her death in 1938 the project was
left incomplete.53
It is not too much to say that the history of Her Majesty’s
reign would gain a lustre were the nation to erect a monu­
ment, say, here in London, to record the names of these
likely to be forgotten heroes. I cannot but believe a general
response would be made to such a suggestion, and intelligent
consideration and artistic power might combine to make
London richer by a work that is beautiful, and our nation
richer by a record that is infinitely honourable.
The material prosperity of a nation is not an abiding possession; the deeds of its people are.
George Frederick Watts, ‘Another Jubilee Suggestion’, The
Times, 5 September 1887
19 The commemorative tiles in the loggia, Postman’s Park, London.
© David Lambert
53 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmans Park
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 20
The 20th-century jubilees
The celebrations in 1935 to mark the 25th anniversary of George V’s
reign were very different in character from those of Victoria. It was an
innovation: a royal Silver Jubilee had never been celebrated publicly
before and it was probably designed to cheer up the population at a time
of economic depression, the renewed threat of world war and high
unemployment. It has been said that the King and his advisers cultivated
a new image for the monarchy in response to what was seen as the rise
of socialism and the labour movement.54 He gradually garnered support
among moderate Labour party politicians and was on friendly terms with
Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister.
As a result of this conscious change, the monarchy seems to have
retained a good deal of popularity during both the First World War and
the economic troubles of the 1920s and 1930s, with gestures such as a
voluntary offer to reduce the civil list in 1931. In his jubilee broadcast, the
King made particular mention of the unemployed: ‘In the midst of this
day’s rejoicing I grieve to think of the numbers of my people who are
still without work. We owe to them, and not least to those who are
suffering from any form of disablement, all the sympathy and help that
we can give.’
In 1926, the King had famously remarked, when it was suggested that the
strikers were revolutionaries, ‘Try living on their wages before you judge
them’.55 George Orwell remarked in 1943 that ‘the affection shown for
George V at the Silver Jubilee was obviously genuine, and it was even
possible to see it in the survival, or recrudescence, of an idea almost as
54 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_V#King_and_Emperor
55 Kenneth Rose, King George V, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983, 340, quoted
in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_V
old as history, the idea of the King and the common people being in a sort
of alliance against the upper classes’. Graffiti in the streets said, ‘Long live
the King. Down with the landlords.’56
King George V Fields
Although a number of initiatives marked the Silver Jubilee in the form of
new parks or new structures, probably the most significant legacy was the
King George’s Fields Foundation. This was set up in commemoration of
the King’s death in 1936, but in the preceding year, the King George V
Jubilee Trust had been formed to raise funds to support the establishment
of ‘more and better facilities for the recreation and guidance of the
younger generation’. It captured the mood of the times and it raised
more than a million pounds.
The Prince of Wales’s speech on the BBC described the new Trust’s aims
as being ‘to encourage the cultivation of abilities, craftsmanship and all
those outdoor interests and activities that make for mental and physical
fitness’. He continued:
I know the need for all this and I have seen with my own
eyes the vast difference of outlook both in body and mind
between the children who have enjoyed these advantages
and those who have not. There are many admirable
voluntary organisations in existence whose aim it is to
promote the welfare of the girls and boys of this country and
the Trust will assist, strengthen and extend their work. It will
enable similar movements to be started in places at present
untouched and pay special attention to areas rural and
56 George Orwell, ‘The English People’, written 1943, published 1947, in The Collected
Essays, Journalism and Letters, 4 vols, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, vol 3, 33
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 21
industrial where this kind of work is held up through lack
of resources and is crying out for help from some central
source … In addition to assisting organisations such as boys’
and girls’ clubs, brigades, scouts and guides, we have in mind
an outdoor programme to help in providing camp sites,
playing fields and for hiking etc, for all young people. Also
an outdoor programme to help towards club premises,
workshops and gymnasiums in areas where such facilities
do not exist today.57
The George V Playing Fields were a separate initiative set up after the
Lord Mayor of London established a National Memorial Fund to
commemorate the King’s death in 1936 by providing playing fields. A King
George’s Fields Foundation was created to implement the project and it
offered grants towards land acquisition. The land was then to be passed
to the National Playing Fields Association ‘to preserve and safeguard the
land for the public benefit’. By the time of the Foundation’s dissolution
in 1965, there were 471 King George V Playing Fields across the UK.
The style was to be modest – ornamental gardens were not eligible and
elaborate gateways were not encouraged. Pairs of lion and unicorn panels
in stone, bronze or brass, as appropriate to the location, were issued to
all fields for installation at the entrance (20). The emphasis was on urban
sites but not exclusively so, and they varied in size from more than 100
acres (40 hectares) to less than a quarter.
The cultural emphasis of the era had shifted from the constraints of the
ornamental park to the healthy exercise of playing fields and outdoor
pursuits. The National Council of the Youth Hostels Association urged
the Government to establish national parks to commemorate the
jubilee.58 The jubilee appeal was strongly focused on youth, and George’s
57 http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/edward_viii/12907.shtml
20 The lion and unicorn panels, designed
for George V Playing Fields.
© The King George’s Fields Foundation
21 Ilkley Lido, opened to commemorate
George V’s Silver Jubilee, 1935, in a
painting by Frank Sherwin
© NMR/ Science & Society Picture Library
reign had coincided with a golden age of outdoor pursuits such as
rambling, rock-climbing, bicycling and swimming. The 1930s was the great
decade of lido-building, at least two of which – at Penzance and Ilkley,
both happily still thriving – were opened specifically as celebrations of the
1935 Jubilee (21).
The 1935 celebrations
One commentator remarked that the London celebrations were markedly
different in character from those of the 1887 and 1897 jubilees. In 1887,
relaxed drinking hours had turned the West End into ‘a perfect
58 Manchester Guardian, 9 April 1935
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 22
Pandemonium’.59 In 1935, by contrast, ‘Never had one seen so much
general unloosening of conventions and class decorum, and never had
one seen in a season of rejoicings so little drunkenness, rowdiness or bad
temper. Perhaps the novel beauty of the floodlighting on the public
buildings and on the trees in the park, and other wonderful signs of the
new era made us more conscious that week that our manners should
be attuned to it.’60 A sign of the times, perhaps, was that the London
Vegetarian Society wrote to the Bishop of Manchester to protest about
‘public ox-roasting for amusement’.61 The mood is captured in press
reports of the celebrations in Hyde Park:
The King last night initiated a spectacular act of celebration of
his Jubilee Day by pressing an electric button at Buckingham
Palace and lighting the huge beacon in Hyde Park, which was
the signal for a chain of fires to sweep round the British Isles.
When the time for the lighting of the beacon approached the
crowd became so dense that it was impossible for traffic
outside the Hyde Park to move. Inside the park Jubilee
revellers who could not get near the beacon danced to the
strains of all sorts of instruments – mouth-organs, accordions,
portable gramophones, and bugles. Others joined in commu­
nity singing. Rockets were fired from buildings gaily lighted
with red, white and blue lights. As the first flames leapt from
the beacon at 9.55 cheer upon cheer sounded through the
park. Crowds of people ran towards the beacon from all parts
of the park, and many people climbed the railings in order to
obtain a view of the spectacle.62
59 Manchester Guardian, 23 June 1887
60 Manchester Guardian, 1 January 1936
61 Manchester Guardian, 13 March 1935
Elsewhere, a crowd of between 100,000 and 150,000 gathered at the
Princess Road Exhibition Ground in Manchester to hear a royal salute and
watch a march past of the Territorial Army in front of the mayor and Lord
Derby. Another took place at Buile Hill Park in Salford and when the
battalions left the park to the accompaniment of stirring marches, ‘the
masses of townspeople who lined the footpaths hailed them heartily’.63
The newspaper reports described ‘Throngs in the Park – Music and
Sunshine’. ‘Men, women and children crowded by tens of thousands into
the municipal parks. On no normal bank holiday that can readily be
remembered was there anything comparable to this massing in the open
air … Wythenshawe, Heaton Park, Platt Fields and all the lesser public
playgrounds presented the same happy picture of a people making
common holiday.’
Platt Fields in the early afternoon was a good example of the
general way of rejoicing. As in a dozen other parks, here was
an excellent band playing. The sun shone hotly, the grass was
new-cropped and sweet-smelling, the trees were in their
cleanest clothing of varied greens. Families just trooped in by
thousands, at all entrances and took possession, hearing the
music and lying about in the warm sun upon the grass
thought they were on Hampstead Heath or Blackpool sands.
Every one of the scores of tennis courts and every bowling
green was in play, all the little row-boats under many
amateur oarsmen were out upon the lake, and the motorlaunch Tom Fox, with flags dressed, popped among the
smaller fry with continuous lucrative cargoes. A fresh breeze
from the north-west extended all the flags and the sun
touched upon the shallow green water with silvery ripples.
62 Manchester Guardian, 7 May 1935
63 Manchester Guardian, 7 May 1935
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 23
About tea-time some cloud blew up as though a storm
threatened, but it was no more than a threat, and the
evening remained fine for the later band concerts and so the
people could stay in the parks until it was time to take to the
trams and make a tour of the lighted and decorated streets.64
In Boggart Hole Clough, in the evening, the North Central Manchester
Division of the Boy Scouts’ Association marched in procession to the
beacon in the park, each carrying a Chinese lantern. ‘This little procession,
with its coloured lamps bobbing above the heads of a host of spectators
following in its wake, must surely have been one of the most charming
of Manchester’s list of celebrations.’ They formed a circle around the
bonfire, which was as high as a haystack. ‘The crescent moon and one
bright star hung over the crowd, and the sky darkened gradually to a deep
blue and dun colour.’ At ten o’clock, a rocket was fired and the beacon lit
by the local MP: ‘As the fire increased the sky and the sea of faces right
away to the park gates glowed with a cheerful light.’65
New parks and the 1935 jubilee
Jubilee Park at Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire exemplified the new Georgian
aesthetic with its emphasis on healthy outdoor pursuits (22). It was made
on part of the estate of Petwood House, which had been built around
1905 by the Baroness von Eckhardstein, who subsequently divorced the
Baron and married Captain (later Sir) Archibald Weigall. In 1933 it was
decided to turn the house into a hotel and to create a new public park and
lido, which was opened in 1935 as the Royal Jubilee Park. After the war it
was handed over to the village as a gift at a ceremony on the day of
Queen Mary’s 80th birthday. At the dedication, Sir Archibald recalled that
his wife had envisaged the park as ‘a centre for recreation and repose for
the inhabitants of Woodhall Spa and the surrounding district’, and he
The jubilee celebrations in Peel Park in Bradford were recorded in a
delightful film.66 They begin with a medieval battle re-enactment,
complete with children in historic costume; there are knights on horse­
back and a parade of children in historic costume following a group of
hooded monks; dancing follows; then a Civil War re-enactment in which
the cavaliers are vanquished, after which there is a Royal Salute from the
cannons. Boats and canoes are out on the lake, and a band is playing in
the bandstand watched by a large audience. Finally, the ‘Jubilee-ation’ is
completed by a firework display, headed ‘Fairyland in Peel Park’.
22 Jubilee Park, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, opened in 1935, in a photograph taken c 1965.
© Francis Frith
64 Manchester Guardian, 7 May 1935
65 Manchester Guardian, 7 May 1935
66 http://www.yfaonline.com/node/4223
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 24
expressed the hope that the local authority would not regard the park as
income-earning primarily, but as a way of giving young and old the
opportunity for real enjoyment.67
George V’s jubilee was also taken as an opportunity for a number of
more conventional public parks and features. In Woodhouse Moor Park
in Leeds, a jubilee avenue was planted by children (23). In the London
Borough of Ealing, the council bought some 12 acres (5 hectares) of
farmland to lay out Jubilee Park and the more ornamental Jubilee
Gardens, including an Arts and Crafts-style Library and Welfare Centre.
Jubilee Park in Edmonton was planned for the 1935 jubilee but did not
open until 1939, when its main entrance featured a spectacular Art Deco
arch (24). The Jubilee Gates at the south entrance to Queen Mary’s
Gardens in Regent’s Park are more conventional in style: they were
donated by the artist Sigismund Goetze, and officially opened by the
Queen on 6 May 1935 after the remodelling of the gardens. In Ward
24 The entrance arch to Jubilee Park, Edmonton, London.
© Felix O (Flickr)
23 Children planting a
jubilee avenue at
Woodhouse Moor,
Leeds, in1935.
© British Pathe
Jackson Park in Hartlepool a new shelter marked the 1935 jubilee,
joining a bandstand and fountain that had been built to mark Queen
Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.
Jubilee Gardens in Crewe were a modest but charming addition to the
borough’s parks and gardens (25). In 2011 they were the site of ‘a guerilla
knitting attack’, when a lamp post was draped in brightly coloured scarves,
to herald a Lottery-funded Diamond Jubilee event, the Tree Cozy
project. This will see the gardens and other sites around the town get
‘a wool makeover’ with trees wrapped in specially made scarves and
jumpers (26).68
67 http://www.woodhallspa.org/leisure_jubilee_park.html
68 http://artyarn-jubileegardens.blogspot.com
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-stoke-staffordshire-14032176
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 25
1977 jubilee exhibitions and events
25 Jubilee Gardens, Crewe, laid out to celebrate George V’s 1935 silver jubilee.
© Francis Frith
26 Jubilee Gardens, Crewe:
volunteers knitting for the
2012 diamond jubilee ‘Tree
Cozy’ community art project.
© Artyarn
69 See Vanley Burke Gallery Ten, on http://www.digitalhandsworth.org.uk
70 Caroline Tisdall, ‘The jubilee exhibition in Battersea Park is an affront to the landcape
and the public’, The Guardian, 17 June 1977
The 1977 Silver Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II continued many of the
themes of her grandfather’s 1935 celebrations. A Queen’s Silver Jubilee
Trust was established and its focus was similarly on the young. Again, it
took place at a time of economic problems and prompted some protests
– the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ and ‘Stuff the Jubilee’ badges
expressed a level of popular dissent – and celebrations were once more
pitched to avoid controversy. An eloquent insight into the times is given
by the photographer Vanley Burke, who commented on his own
photograph of a boy in Handsworth Park around the time of the
jubilee (27): ‘With all the political connotations of the British Flag,
especially in the late 1970s, it’s interesting to see a child for whom it is
merely something colourful to decorate his bike with.’69
Event-planning again took full advantage of public parks. There was a
Silver Jubilee Exhibition in Hyde Park during July and August, while in
Battersea Park a Silver Jubilee Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture
featured works by among others Elizabeth Frink, Kenneth Draper and Ian
Hamilton Finlay. The Battersea exhibition prompted angry protests from
residents at the sequestration and closure to the public of a favourite part
of the park for the summer months.70 More mundanely, Jubilee Gardens
on the South Bank featured an exhibition of street furniture, ‘litter bins,
bus shelters, bollards and poster hoardings, allegedly chosen for their fine
design’.71 A strawberry tea-party was held at the Cakehouse in St James’s
Park, now demolished, ‘held for people who could remember three
jubilees, of whom there were about eighty-five’.72
71 Martin Wainwright, ‘And so … back to the old royal routine’, The Guardian,
9 June 1977
72 ibid
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 26
27 A boy in Handsworth Park at the
time of the 1977 Jubilee.
© Vanley Burke
Prudhoe Bay. Leyland Cars displayed an old and a new Jaguar; Croft
showed off its special Jubilee sherry. The organiser, Neville Labovitch,
who received the MBE for his work on the Exhibition, was also
Vice-Chairman, and later Chairman of the Jubilee Walkway Trust.73
Just across the park a more modest Silver Jubilee exhibition on the royal
parks was being held at Kensington Palace.
The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors took charge of arrangements
for a network of jubilee beacons, including one on Snow Hill in Windsor
The Silver Jubilee Exhibition in Hyde Park, in a conscious echo of the
1851 Great Exhibition, was intended to demonstrate ‘the scope and
achievement of British industry and commerce’, showcasing the work
of thirty-one public and private sector companies selected for their
significance in Britain’s social and economic life (28). It was held in a huge
marquee supplied by British Petroleum, which had used it at the inaugura­
tion of the Forties Oil Field in Aberdeen in 1975. The National Coal
Board created an exhibit showing working conditions down a mine, with
apprentices on hand to give first-hand accounts of the work; British
Petroleum featured an igloo in which visitors were subjected to the
temperatures they would experience in Alaska, complete with wind
sound-effects to show working conditions during drilling operations in
28 Interior of the Hyde
Park Silver Jubilee
exhibition tent, 1977.
© courtesy of the High
Wycombe Furniture Archive
73 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1391141/Neville-Labovitch.html
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 27
Great Park, surprisingly close to the equestrian statue of George III. The
three-mile route from the town up the Long Walk was ‘lined by thousands
of children bearing flaming torches and by a great assembly of costumed
members of the Sealed Knot’. On 6 June, the Queen lit the beacon by
igniting a fuse with the torch used at the Melbourne and London Olympic
games. There followed ‘an extensive programme of activities and
entertainments. There was an impressive display of fireworks and
“set-pieces”, a traditional roasting of oxen by the Army Catering Corps,
and music provided by the Bands of the Royal Horse Guards and the Life
Guards. The Guards organised a tent for the sale of jubilee souvenirs, in
which a commemorative map of the beacons was also on sale; while the
Windsor Boys Club did a roaring trade in the sale of first-day covers of
jubilee stamps.’ The crowd was estimated at between 250,000 and
300,000.74 Windsor Great Park had also been the site in May of a parade
of Rolls-Royce cars, in which every model ever made was represented in
a cavalcade from the Home Park, through the castle grounds, down the
Long Walk, to Ascot racecourse.
Built and planted memorials included trees, such as the Tree of Heaven
planted for the Jubilee rededication of the Bromley College gardens or
the grove of twelve silver birch trees planted in Queen’s Gate Gardens in
Kensington; and statuary, such as View by Naomi Blake in Fitzroy Square,
Camden (29), and the bowl in Queen Square, also in Camden, donated
by Faber & Faber with its inscriptions by Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes.
New parks and the 1977 jubilee
A variety of new open spaces were created to celebrate the 1977 Silver
Jubilee. Many were quite modest in size – Jubilee Gardens in Rugby, one of
three open spaces created there to celebrate the jubilee, was only half an
74 Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, Silver Jubilee Beacons, London: RICS, 1977
29 View, by Naomi
Blake, Fitzroy Square,
London, commissioned
to mark the 1977
Silver Jubilee.
© Russ London
(Wikimedia Commons)
acre – others were substantial, such as the Jubilee Country Park in Bromley
in Kent, laid out in 1977 on a former industrial site. ‘Country’ was added to
its name to avoid giving the impression that Jubilee Park was formally
arranged in the manner of some other municipal parks.75 The Silver Jubilee
Walkway around the streets of London, with its directional discs set in the
pavement, was inspired by Max Nicholson as a way not only to display the
sights of the city but also to lure walkers to the new Jubilee Gardens on the
South Bank; it proved a success with visitors and residents alike.
75 http://jubileecountrypark.btck.co.uk/About%20us/The_Park
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 28
The 1970s saw the beginning of a disastrous spiral of decline in park main­
tenance and some jubilee parks and gardens have struggled, most notably
Jubilee Gardens on the South Bank, which is now set for a major revamp
in time for the Diamond Jubilee in 2012. It is thus not surprising that a
number of the repairs or refurbishments to Victorian parks made for the
1977 jubilee celebrations are now showing their age. In Queen’s Park,
Crewe, a new Jubilee Cafeteria was opened by the Queen Mother, to
replace the original pavilion which had been burnt down in 1972. At
Victoria Park in Ashford, a group of local businessmen celebrated the
1977 jubilee by sponsoring the repair of the grand Hubert Fountain (30).
In 1998, the fountain was restored with a grant from the Heritage Lottery
Fund, and further conservation work followed in 2007.
30 The recently restored Hubert Fountain in Victoria Park, Ashford, Kent.
© Ashford Borough Council
The 21st-century jubilees
The Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002 took place in slightly happier
times for public parks and gardens. Many older parks had been restored
by the Heritage Lottery Fund, or used Lottery funds to stage events,
create memorials or even lay out new parks. The restoration of Central
Parks in Southampton was crowned in 2002 by a new Queen’s Peace
Fountain as part of the jubilee celebrations (31), and a new Jubilee
Garden was established at Mount Edgcumbe Country Park, Plymouth, in
the same year. At Cedars Park, created in the early 19th century around
the site of the former royal palace at Theobalds in Hertfordshire,
31 The Queen Elizabeth II Peace Fountain, Southampton Central Park, opened as part
of the 2002 Golden Jubilee celebrations.
© David Lambert
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 29
Broxbourne Borough Council commissioned new entrance gates, with a
timeline for the park set out in bronze roundels.
A new Jubilee Park was laid out above Canary Wharf station for the 2002
celebrations. Designed by Wirtz International, with grass mounds, an
almost Arts-and-Crafts water channel and bold planting of metasequoias,
it has proved a popular oasis among the high-rise buildings of London’s
Docklands.
The celebrations were carefully calibrated, however, as it was felt that
support for the monarchy was not as widespread as it had been in 1977.
The Queen insisted there be no ‘excessive’ expenditure: support had
been severely shaken by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997
and been further eroded by the ‘Sophiegate’ scandal over royal expenses
in 2001: one senior royal official spoke of concern that the event might be
met with ‘a wave of apathy’.76 Proving that the spirit of William Morris
was still alive and well, the Bedfordshire Socialist Alliance Democratic and
Republican Platform held a ‘Republican Jubilee’ party in Luton’s People’s
Park on 4 June.
The Diamond Jubilee will be celebrated in two forms familiar from
previous jubilees – tree-planting and out-door recreation. The Woodland
Trust is sponsoring the planting of six million trees in hundreds of new
Jubilee Woods by communities and landowners. The sites will range in
size from 3 acres (1.2 hectares) upwards, and it is planned to include sixty
Diamond Woods of 60 acres (24 hectares) or more.
recreational spaces ‘from sports pitches to woodlands, children’s play
areas to gardens and bicycle trails to parks’.77 Sites are being nominated as
Queen Elizabeth II Fields through a public vote, and will be permanently
protected via a deed of dedication between Fields in Trust and the owner.
They are eligible for funding from Sport England’s Protecting Playing Fields
fund and from a dedicated programme supported by the Sita Trust.
And finally there is the Jubilee Greenway, a new 60km walking and cycling
route – one kilometre for each year of Her Majesty’s reign – linking
many of London’s Olympic Games venues and public green spaces.
Along with registered historic parks like Hyde Park, Greenwich Park and
Regent’s Park the route includes Victoria Park (Grade II*) in Hackney, in
the creation of which the young Queen Victoria played such an important
part. Currently being restored with a Heritage Lottery Fund grant, its
popularity demonstrates the continuing importance of public parks in this
jubilee year (32).
32 Victoria Park,
Hackney, a people’s
park first opened in
1845 and now part of
the 2012 Diamond
Jubilee Greenway.
© Craig Boney (Flickr)
Fields in Trust, which as the National Playing Fields Association played a
key role in the George V Fields, has launched a Queen Elizabeth II Fields
programme. This aims to offer permanent protection and new funding to
76 Ben Summerskill, ‘Apathy threatens the royal jubilee’, The Guardian, 29 July 2001
77 http://www.qe2fields.com/QueenelizabethIIcharityfieldschallenge.aspx
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 30
Conclusion
Public parks are, as Ruskin said, the measure of a city’s greatness and its
cities are the measure of a civilisation’s greatness. They remain, as they
were designed, places where large numbers of people can come together
on festive occasions. In this they play a unique part in the life of modern
towns and cities, just as they did in previous centuries.
They are also a key locus for the commemoration of events and
individuals, local and national. From the most modest bench to the
grandest statue, a park is a repository of memory, both personal
and public. As such, they display a large number and wide variety of
memorials to the monarchy.
For these two simple reasons, around the country, public parks and
gardens have played a central role in the celebration and the commemo­
ration of royal jubilees throughout history. Let us hope that this year’s
Diamond Jubilee celebrations, which again will focus attention on public
parks, will help to ensure that the importance of keeping them in good
condition is properly recognised, and that they are properly maintained
for future generations and future jubilees.
‘Jubilee-ation!’: A history of royal jubilees in public parks 31
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr Simon Baddeley, Friends of
Handsworth Park; Albert Bertram; Dr Hazel Conway; Dr Todd Longstaffe
Gowan; Dr Stewart Harding; Peter Ogilvie, Salford Museum & Art
Gallery; the Hon Jane Roberts, Librarian of the Royal Library, Windsor
Castle; Jenifer White, English Heritage and Sally Williams, London Historic
Parks and Gardens Trust. In addition, he is grateful for the assistance of
the staff at the Birmingham City Library; Bolton Museum and Art Gallery;
Liverpool Central Library; Manchester Central Library; the Central
Library, St Helens; and the Museum of Wigan Life in Wigan.
English Heritage would also like to thank Elinor Davies, Dr Brent Elliott,
Colum Giles, Amy Harris, David Lambert (The Parks Agency), Susan
Wightman (Libanus Press) and Rowan Whimster (Whimster Associates).
Published April 2012
© English Heritage
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